BEIRUT, 30 May 2006 — The Lebanese Army said Israeli warplanes violated Lebanon’s airspace yesterday, one day after rockets fired from south Lebanon sparked tit-for-tat clashes in which two militants were killed.
Israel said it wanted to avoid an escalation of fighting with militants in Lebanon after the worst flare-up of violence this year on the volatile border, but insisted the country would defend itself against attack.
“Ten enemy fighter-bombers violated Lebanese airspace twice in the middle of the day,” the army said. The warplanes overflew the entire country and broke the sound barrier over the southern port city of Tyre.
“Israel has no interest in an escalation on the northern border, but will know how to hurt those who try to hurt its citizens even more,” Defense Minister Amir Peretz told Israeli radio earlier.
He called the response to Sunday’s rocket attacks “determined and unequivocal, and the message was understood. Israel will do everything in order to lead to calm and quiet on the northern border.” Tensions were still running high after the series of attacks across the border on Sunday that left a pro-Syrian Palestinian militant and a Lebanese Hezbollah fighter dead and two Israeli soldiers injured.
The fighting was sparked when rockets were fired into northern Israel and Israel responded with air raids on guerrilla bases deep inside Lebanon.
Gen. Gal Hirsh, in charge of Israel’s forces along the border, told Israeli radio: “We hit them hard and took out many targets. We remain on alert. The Hezbollah were surprised by the force of our response.” UN peacekeepers brokered a cease-fire, but each side blamed the other for the flare-up on the border, which remains highly volatile six years after Israel ended its 22-year occupation of southern Lebanon in May 2000.
Milos Strugel, spokesman for the peacekeepers, called the situation “fragile” in remarks yesterday to Lebanese television. The rocket attacks from Lebanon hit deeper into Israel than ever before, near the town of Safed, and residents of the northern towns of Kiryat Shmona and Nahariya were ordered into shelters for several hours.
An Israeli military expert with the Haaretz newspaper, Zeev Schiff, claimed that Hezbollah now had long-range rockets provided by Iran that could hit the center of Israel. He said the rockets could carry up to 600 kilograms (1,300 pounds) of explosives and reach as far as Beersheva in the Negev desert.
The fighting also highlighted the thorny problem over the implementation of a UN resolution which calls for the disarmament of Hezbollah and Syrian-backed Palestinian groups based in Lebanon.
Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Siniora called on the international community to force Israel to withdraw from the disputed Shebaa Farms area, blaming the worsening situation on the frontier on “continuing Israeli occupation.”
Despite Israel’s withdrawal in 2000, violence often flares between Hezbollah fighters and Israeli soldiers in the Shebaa Farms region that was seized from Syria by Israel in 1967 but is now claimed by Lebanon with Damascus’ consent.
Beirut newspapers expressed fears that the violence could hit what was shaping up to be a promising summer tourist season.
The fighting “risks sabotaging the summer tourist season and comes just days before the June 8 resumption of the dialogue on disarming Hezbollah,” said Al-Balad.
Druze leader and MP Walid Jumblatt told the Al-Mostaqbal daily, allied to the anti-Syrian parliamentary majority, that the border clashes were “aimed at sabotaging the tourist season and impoverishing the Lebanese.” Tourism rose 30 percent in the first three months of the year when compared with 2005, which was marked by political upheaval and a series of deadly bomb attacks against opponents of Syria.
